Tuesday, November 25, 2008

GTN2BOXBLA: Cave Story

On today's installment of "Games that NEED to be on XBLA," I'm going to talk about Cave Story. Cave Story is a relatively well known indie game that came out in 2004 and was translated from its native Japanese to English by the fantastic guys over at Aeon Genesis. It's a game in the same vein as Metroid, in that you progress through the game with a pretty good amount of freedom to do what you want while exploring the world (in this case, a big cave). Also, you can't shoot diagonally. There's cute little rabbit creatures called Mimigas that inhabit the cave system, and blablabla. The story is pretty deep for a game of this kind, and I don't want to ruin it for anybody.

Anyways, the game is fantastic and deserves to be played by everyone. Pixel, Cave Story's creator, released the game for free, which is awesome. It's been ported from its original PC incarnation to a number of different systems, including DS, PSP, Xbox, Mac, and many others. Pixel is pretty loose with the source code as long as he knows the people actually have a drive to port it. All that said, I'm in the camp that actually wants to GIVE Pixel money for making such an awesome game, which is just one of the reasons I think Cave Story NEEDS to be on XBLA.

A while back, some stupid company was going to release Cave Story on PSP. Nothing came of it though, even though the company said that nothing was wrong with the project all the way to the day the studio closed. Whatever, that's in the past and this is now. Cave Story will finally see a commercial release on the Wii by Nicalis. A part of Wii's own download service Wiiware, this release has redrawn graphics by Pixel himself, along with HD support and "enhanced" music. The music is great period, but I guess they wanted to redo it with "better" midi tools for whatever reason.

Well, all this is fine and good...expect for one thing; I and many other people I know are virtually out of room on our Wii's. Not a big deal, Cave Story isn't a big download, but still. Cave Story deserves something better than Wiiware; it deserves XBLA and PSN.

Think about it...Cave Story on XBLA...online speedrun leaderboards...achievements...man oh man, it would be sweet. We know there's a market for it; Megaman 9 has sold really well across the 3 consoles. It's not as if Xbox gamers would shrug it off as "old retro crap," or something. Heck, that's pretty much what XBLA is all about (Bionic Commando, Sonic, TMNT Arcade, Pacman, 1942, I could go on and on). All said, I'm going to buy Cave Story on whatever it's released on. Everything; Wii, 360, PS3, DS, PSP. Pixel DESERVES that much from me. Even if he didn't see a dime of it, he deserves to know that his game sold well; that it's a masterpiece.

And, just for fun...here's a list of pottential achievements:

Untouchable: Defeat Balrog without taking any damage - 5 G
Animal Lover: Return all Puppies to Jenka without taking damage - 10G
LVL UP: After acquiring 5 weapons, level them all up to level 3 - 5G
Trade Ya: Acquire the Machine Gun, Snake, and Spur in separate playthroughs - 10G
{<3}: Revive Curly Brace - 15G
"{}": Restore Curly Brace's memory - 15G
Completionist: Acquire every upgrade and item possible - 30G
BAD END: Get the bad ending - 5G
GOOD END: Get the good ending - 20G
REDEMPTION END: Get the redemption ending - 30G
Hell Raiser: Traverse the Sacred Grounds in under 4 minutes - 35G
THE POWER!: Defeat an enemy with a fully leveled Nemesis. - 10G

With the power of "post achievement completion text," all the descriptions could be changed. Other than changing it to past tense (Defeated Balrog, Returned all Puppies, etc.), the text for "THE POWER!" would simply read "Quack."

Alrighty. That's it for this post. See you tomorrow!

-AfroRyan
Still filled with nerd anxiety.

No comments: